Copyright scmp
Ant Group chairman Eric Jing Xiandong touted the company’s tokenisation progress and lauded blockchain’s increased role in financial services at Hong Kong Fintech Week this year, but made no mention of its stalled stablecoin pursuit as regulators move to rein in speculative activities. Ant has used tokenised bank deposits to achieve cross-bank real-time settlement this year through the Hong Kong government’s Project Ensemble, Jing said on Monday at the city’s largest fintech conference. Speaking on the same panel with the Hong Kong government’s Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu, Jing said that last year Ant achieved real-time settlement across different branches of a global bank – without naming which one – as part of the sandbox. “That’s really given a huge, huge confidence that through tokenised deposits and tokenised money, [we could] really achieve real-time global settlement,” Jing said. Project Ensemble was launched in August last year with the aim of exploring different use cases for tokenisation, which refers to the process of creating representations of traditional assets on a blockchain to allow faster and cheaper transactions. Ant Digital Technologies, a unit of Ant Group that began operating independently last year, is a participant in the sandbox. Ant is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post. The operator of one of China’s largest mobile payment services Alipay, Ant is among major mainland Chinese firms looking to capture a share of Hong Kong’s digital-asset market. Ant Digital Technologies operates Jovay, an Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain designed for real-world asset tokenisation, while Ant Group announced in June it planned to apply for a stablecoin licence in the city. During the panel discussion on Monday, Jing did not bring up Ant’s stablecoin initiative, which has stalled because the Chinese government has advised mainland firms to hold off on some digital-asset activities in the city. Stablecoins were not intended for investment or speculation, but were rather “a tool to facilitate cross-border transactions and real-world economic activity”, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said in a speech on Monday. Stablecoin licence approvals would be granted “only to applicants that demonstrate genuine use cases backed by sustainable and robust business models”, Chan said. As of the end of September, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had received stablecoin licence applications from 36 institutions, the city’s de facto central bank said last month. Jing, who has been Ant Group chairman since 2018 and served two stints as group CEO from 2016 to 2019 and from 2021 to February this year, also said on Monday that blockchain-based transactions had become more mainstream with more regulations and institutional involvement. Transactions on the blockchain were beginning to shift from speculation to “value exchange”, he said. At last year’s Fintech Week, he also extolled the value that tokenisation could bring to cross-border payments.
